Sunday Stillpoint: The Spirit of Place

"Different places in nature have different vital effluence, different vibrations, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars…But the spirit of place is a great reality."
--D.H. Lawrence

"Lost in awe at the beauty around me, I must have slipped into a state of heightened awareness…brief flashes of spiritual ecstasy…the self was utterly absent: I and the chimpanzees, the earth and trees and air, seemed to merge, to become one with the spirit power of life itself."
--Jane Goodall, "A Reason for Hope; A Spiritual Journey"

"After dinner we walked to Salisbury Plain. On the broad downs, under the gray sky, not a house was visible, nothing but Stonehenge, which looked like a group of brown dwarfs in the wide expanse…On top of the mountain, the old temple would not be more impressive."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, upon visiting Stonehenge for the first time with his friend, Thomas Carlyle

"I remember, it was very cold, with the sharp wind fanning out across the plain, but when we got to the rocks, and entered the circle, it seemed as if a hush closed over us, a feeling of peace that I can't describe, and it was at least ten degrees warmer."
--My daughter, Jessica Mills, describing a winter sunrise visit to Stonehenge


Just about anybody can describe a special place in their lives, a place they once visited, or a favorite place, or even a place they chose to call home, that holds a quality almost magical to them. Maybe it's a place in nature so beautiful that they can lose themselves in the quiet and peace. Maybe it's a famous landmark that holds legendary spiritual qualities of power or soul-sustenance--a Machu Pichu or a Stonehenge. Maybe it's a house or a holy place, like a cathedral, that captivates us. It can even be a country.

Sometimes we are drawn to these places for reasons we can't describe. Or, upon visiting for the first time, feel such an uncanny sense of "home" that everything else, the rest of our lives, feels slightly "off."

When I was graduating high school, no one in my family offered me any encouragement to go to college. It was expected that I would find a husband to "take care of me," and, failing that, move into an apartment with girlfriends and work until I could find that elusive male savior.

But I had this idea in my head that I was meant to go, and I didn't even know why because I knew there wasn't any money for it. I knew I'd have to do all the applying and inquiring--and paying for--on my own.

A sympathetic high school English teacher told me that she'd gone to Stephen F. Austin University, down in Nacogdoches, Texas. They had an excellent liberal arts program, she said, since I knew even then I wanted to be an author and I would be majoring in English.

She said, her voice wistful, "It's so beautiful there."

And that was that. For reasons I can't explain to this day, I did not submit any other applications to any other colleges or universities. Nor did I visit the campus--I couldn't, really. I didn't have a car, for one thing, and my parents never offered to take me or cared whether I went or not.

When the acceptance letter came, I was thrilled, but I did not see the campus until freshman orientation. Three of my girlfriends were going down that week; one had a car and we were all riding with her on the first big adventure of our lives. I set the whole thing up, sent in the deposit from my own earnings, and packed without ever even asking my parents' permission.

So we four giggling gals crammed into Pam's old Corvair and headed from Dallas down into the deep east Piney woods of Texas. The campus was located smack in the middle of the Davy Crockett National Forest, and we drove up and down wooded hills and cooled our heels behind lumber trucks. Straight into Nacogdoches, down Highway 59, up to Dorm 15, and into the parking lot. Everybody piled out of the car.

For the rest of my life, I will not forget what came over me in that moment. As I stepped out onto the pavement, I tilted my head, gazing up into the tops of towering pines, and the excited chatter and laughter of my girlfriends faded away, like someone had put cotton over my ears.

I was home.

Just like that. All the years I'd felt "different," both in my parents' home and definitely all through school, simply fell away. All the loneliness and frustration and nail-biting anxiety of trying to fit in, trying to belong, vanished.

I was home.

It was that simple. For the remainder of my four years on that campus, I never once--not ever--felt "homesick." Rather, whenever I'd go home to work in the summers or over Christmas or spring break, I would feel what I came to call, "schoolsickness," because I missed that place so much.

When I married and moved to west Texas, the hardest thing about it was not that I was 500 miles away from my mother. It was that I was a good nine-hour drive from Nac. I did not get to see my old college campus again for almost twenty years.

Then a notice came in the mail of a college day for high school seniors. My son was about to be a senior. I looked at my husband and said, "We're going. I don't care if you have business. I don’t care how long the drive is. I don’t care what anybody says. I am going to take my children to see Stephen F."

After all, we'd gone to Texas A&M just about every year of their lives.

My son became an Aggie, just as he'd always dreamed. But when my daughter told me that she had fallen in love with the campus too, and that she wanted to go to school there, I cried.

Every visit to see her on-campus was a double delight for me, and I always set aside time to go off by myself and wander the pine-needle carpeted trails through the trees and sit awhile, just to drink in the presence of home. When she graduated, I cried doubly hard, knowing that not only were those glorious days over for her and our family, but that it might be many more years before I sat under those trees again.

Not that the experience has not ever happened again. When we bought our place out in the country, this old rock house perched atop a windy hill was nearly 100 years old and a series of renters had trashed the place. There was one tree, an old half-dead mesquite, out back. The pens and barn were falling down. It was 20 miles from town. Not much except the price seemed appealing.

The realtor took us on a hike through the acreage, and down in a hollow, tucked away behind a silent spring, was a grove of Chinaberry trees. They arched gracefully overhead, whispering in the wind, and the birdsong echoed. Somewhere in the distance came the plaintive cry of a lonesome coyote, and I knew, in that moment, that I had found a new home.

There are many reasons why one place might speak to us and another not. Or why some people crave the arid desert while others feel suffocated if they're not near the ocean. Some need the mountains or the forest, whereas city-dwellers have their favorite rooftops or stained-glass serenity they seek when troubled.

Ancient peoples charted something called "lei lines," which are magnetic courses that traverse the globe, and chose to erect temples in such places because of qualities that seemed magical. Magnetic power has proven healing properties, and a place like Stonehenge carries a strong magnetic power field--which accounts, in part, for the warmth my daughter felt within its sheltering circle.

But in his book, The Rebirth of Nature, naturalist and author Rupert Sheldrake, proposed another theory he calls, morphic resonance:

"Memory also plays a part in the response of animals and people to the particular place. Obviously, when people enter the place, their memory of their previous experience in the place or in similar places will tend to effect their present experience. But in addition to individual memory, through morphic resonance there will also be a component of collective memory through which a person can tune in to the past experiences of other people in the same place."

(Sheldrake goes on to explain that not all those experiences are good, pointing out that places in which people have been murdered often carry qualities that give them the reputation of being "haunted.")

I don't know if there's such a thing as collective memory of place, but I do know that people who visit our home often speak about a sense they get of peace and sanctuary, of homey welcome and happiness. Granted, I try to make the place a welcoming one where people can prop up their feet or snack in front of the TV without concern for fancy furnishings, but it's more than that.

Through the years, we've often received unexpected company, people whose faces have grown wrinkled and weathered, their eyes shining as they've told how they grew up here, at the turn of the century, or during the Depression, and all of them seemed to feel such joy at being back here. Does it mean their childhoods were routinely happy? Or that they have joyful memories of growing up here, of playing in the Chinaberry Grove just as my children did, of laughter and love?

I do know that many times, as I've puttered around alone while the kids were at school and Kent away, I have felt a spirit--for lack of a better word--of contentment and quiet joy. Did it mean we didn't have any problems? I laugh at the question! But the sense this house gives, that somehow, everything is going to be all right, is one I can't describe.

When my son got back from his first deployment to Iraq, as per the Marine Corps custom, he wasn't allowed to take his leave home for a couple weeks. So he had some time to adjust to being back in the States and to getting caught up on rest. We picked him up at DFW and spent a weekend visiting family in the metroplex, then started the long drive home. He spoke animatedly to us for several hours, then grew quiet, then dozed off.

When we got home, he walked in, said how good it felt to be home, then stretched out on the living room sofa.

He did not move again for more than 24 hours. My husband, who'd been pretty stoic during Dustin's war service, grew teary-eyed as he watched Dustin sleep.

"He finally feels safe," he said.

And that is, in the long run I think, what spiritual places give to us: a feeling of safety.

Safety, and, especially in powerful places in nature, a sense of incredible spiritual connection.

Biologist Jane Goodall spent many years in the African jungle, studying chimpanzees. She would often pack a meager lunch of fruit and cheese and spend an entire day alone, deep in the jungle, watching the animals and writing down her observations. In her book, Reason for Hope, A Spiritual Journey, she tells one amazing story of getting so close to one male that she was able to share some berries with him. Before leaving her, he reached out, took her hand, and squeezed it, as if to say, thank you.

The natural beauty of the rain forests where she watched the chimps cast a spell over her, and gave her a depth of spiritual understanding that can elude even those formally trained in seminary:

"In a flash of 'outsight' I had known timelessness and quiet ecstasy, sensed a truth of which mainstream science is merely a small fraction. And I knew that the revelation would be with me for the rest of my life, imperfectly remembered yet always within. A source of strength on which I could draw when life seemed harsh or cruel or desperate."

Those flashes of awareness come like quicksilver, but they stay forever. Anyone who has ever felt it can describe in detail where they were and what they were doing as if it were yesterday. All we know for sure is that God's creation has a voice, and it speaks to us.

"The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor…What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows."
--Thomas Merton, "Raids on the Unspeakable"